With all of the SATA III drives coming out with regularity, those with older SATA II hardware might be feeling a little left out in the cold. Never fear, Crucial has a line of V4 SSDs in various capacities that are SATA II based with peformance that's admirable. How did it fare? Have a look at the article to see the numbers and our impressions.

Crucial lists the capabilities of V4 256GB SATA II SSD as being able to reach read speeds of up to 230MB/s and writes up to 190MB/s. In two out of three synthetic benchmarks, we saw these specifications exceeded with the max reads hitting a hair under 280MB/s and writes just under 240MB/s. Obviously, this is best case performance scenarios but it gives a clear indication of what the drives are capable of although the lesser capacity versions will return lower results. Being a value oriented drive, we feel like the performance is very solid.

A little torn on this one. For only forty bucks more you can get the M4 256Gb SATA 6Gbps drive. Personally I think I would go with the faster SATA 6Gbps drive while planning on upgrading the rest of the system one day. Kinda curious how the M4 would compare to the V3 if it were plugged into the SATA 3Gbps ports on the board. Wondering if the V4 is the limiting factor or if the SATA 3Gbps ports are the limiting factor.

I just updated a bunch of systems for a local business that used budget boards that were SATA II only and this drive would have been perfect... A few new entry level chipsets are still only supporting SATA II, so this would be ideal for those builds where you need to build 12 machines, they won't be updated for 5 years so SATA III is never a concern, and they still want new features like TRIM that wasn't available on some of the older drives that are still floating around. A $10 price difference adds up when you are building many systems and that is where the V4 shines. Curucial came out with this drive due to the price point only. I like it and for those updating old systems that they don't want to replace it is ideal.